This paper traces the recent use of risk management techniques as a tool for governing informal urban areas in Greater Cairo, and for making them visible as objects of policy and intervention. In the wake of a 2008 landslide that killed 119 people and embarrassed the government by highlighting its inability to prevent the catastrophe or even rescue its victims, a Presidential decree created the Informal Settlements Development Fund (ISDF). The fund, organized under the Prime Minister's office, was charged with the task of mapping and developing informal areas, with priority given to neighborhoods classified as “areas that threaten life”. Following the literature on the politics of technical expertise, and in particular on 'risk' as a category constructed through expert practice, this paper focuses on the process used by the ISDF to assess informal areas, placing that process in the context of official discourse on informality as a site of disorder and danger. The aim of the ISDF assessment was to determine which areas of Greater Cairo would be categorized as 'unplanned' and thus slated for long-term upgrade plans, and which areas would be categorized as 'unsafe' and thus slated for immediate removal. Accordingly, the central argument of this paper is twofold. First, that the categories that were developed to map risk and classify informal areas elide the distinctions between poverty, informality, and danger, essentially constructing 'risk' to be near-synonymous with the most marginal areas of the city. And second, this framework has the effect of making informal areas visible to officials almost exclusively through the lens of risk. In this sense, risk assessment and risk management as deployed here can be seen as a technique of governance, with implications for understanding the interactions between officials, experts, and a large segment of Cairo's urban population. By making informality legible as a site of disaster or of potential disaster, and making residents legible as potential disaster victims, this framework authorizes extraordinary measures of control and intervention over wide swathes of the city.